


The Grinches of Eligius

by the_most_beautiful_broom



Series: 12 Days of Ficmas 2018 [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, F/M, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Snowed In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-08-29 14:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16745350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_most_beautiful_broom/pseuds/the_most_beautiful_broom
Summary: For the prompt "my car got stuck in snow you saved me"





	The Grinches of Eligius

The snowstorm had come out of nowhere.

The Weather Channel had promised some light rain, maybe even a brief downpour around 4pm, but it wasn’t until some intern noticed the white coating the parking lot at Eligius Industries that everyone realized what was happening. There was a bit of a panic—it was Christmas Eve, after all, and people really didn’t want to be in the office in the first place—as everyone grabbed their stuff and sprinted for the doors.

Zeke figured he’d wait it out.

Not necessarily because he thought it’d stop snowing, but because he wasn’t in a hurry. Besides, if he left with the rush of people, there’d be traffic  _and_ snow to deal with. Nah, he’d deal with the snow at 6pm, well after all the people with souls had left the city for the day.

He liked his job. Liked the city, too, liked the energy and challenge of it. But flights back to Michigan were damn expensive, especially around the holidays, and he could cash out his PTO at the end of the year, so he stayed. He had a couple of reports to crank out, and he didn’t realize he was the last one to leave the office until the lights switched off, and the warning from the alarm system echoed faintly through the building.

He jumped up, running for the elevator.

“I’m still here,” he yelled, and he heard a muffled curse from around the corner, then someone quickly entering the code into the alarm system to disarm it.

The beeping stopped, and Zeke sighed in relief as he rounded the corner; the last thing he needed was for the motion sensors to pick up on him and call the police. Again, not like he had anywhere to be, but he’d bet everyone would be...less than holly and jolly.

He didn’t recognize the woman in front of the pin pad.

She had dark hair, brown eyes, smart eyes. She pulled at the laptop bag over her shoulder, readjusting the weight of it.

“Oh hey, Zeke,” she said lightly, wincing when some of her hair got caught under the strap of the bag. “And here I thought I was the only Grinch at Eligius.”

He knew he didn’t know who she was, but he had no idea how that was possible. He’d been at Eligius for almost four years now, and knew every sales person on the floor. Which made her proposals, HR, IT, or consulting...but still didn’t explain how he’d imagined to forget a face like hers.

“Didn’t want to fight the traffic,” he said quickly, easily, like his mind wasn’t racing to place her.  

The woman hummed, twirling a keychain with no less than 15 keys around her finger. “Smart. That’s what I was thinking, too. You’ll lock up when you’re done, yeah?”

He nodded, and before he could say anything else, she was moving past him, back towards the elevator.

“Thanks, Shaw,” she called over her shoulder, “Merry Christmas.”

The elevator dinged, the woman stepped into it, and it dinged again, before Zeke realized he hadn’t moved.

He spent the next twenty minutes squinting at the centimeter-wide profile pictures on Eligius’ internal communications system, but none of them matched the woman from the elevator. He wasn’t one to give up easily, but he didn’t have much of an alternative; as he was exiting out of all his open applications, Zeke blinked at the open chat bar in the bottom of his screen.

It was pretty much always open, a help-line turned easy-conversation with some tech guru that had been pretty constant over the past six months.

A tech guru named Raven Reyes, easily the smartest person in Eligius’ employ, with no profile picture on her internal profile.

He pushed back from the computer, templing his fingers in front of him. Miller, the other top sales rep who went to most clients with him, who had recently taken to accusing Zeke of fabricating excuses to talk to IT, was going to have a hey day with this one.

When their cloud host went down back in February, Raven had hacked the mainframe and gotten their office online four hours before cloud services were officially restored. She gave him all his stats on his marketing emails and campaigns, and gave him numbers for his presentations. When a prospective client had spilled a vintage bourbon on his laptop, Zeke had dropped off the sizzling machine to IT; Raven had managed to salvage three months of SOWs off the fried hard drive. She’d left a post-it with a stamp of a bird on top of his computer and he’d bought the whole IT department coffee for the next week.

Zeke’s drummed his fingers over the keyboard, looking at the chat window. The last thing she’d sent was an eye roll emoji when he’d told her she’d better not be pulling data over Christmas.

So, she was smarter than anyone in sales, combined, and now he knew she looked like the face of a Nike campaign.

The sound of a siren, twenty stories down, pulled Zeke out of his reverie.

Okay so he’d known she was a genius. And funny. And that Miller wasn’t far off when he muttered ‘crush’ every time Zeke’s computer dinged with a notification. So, so what. She knew it was him, but hadn’t said anything other than merry christmas.

Well, and called him a Grinch.

Zeke shook his head, closing out of the chat and pulling his laptop off the docking station. He had 48 hours to figure out what to do with the fact that he now had a face to match a mind.

He locked up the office, bellowing ’last call’ around the empty corridors. Just in case. Set the alarm, rushed to the elevator, clenched his teeth at the cold when he stepped out into the parking garage.

He’d been right to wait.

Snow was still falling, but the plows had been out and the roads weren’t bad. Once he made it out of downtown, Zeke felt his shoulders relax; he sat up straighter behind the wheel of his car. There wasn’t a station on the radio that wasn’t playing something festive, so he had his phone in the drink holder, playing Billy Joel in protest.

The roads were basically empty; the only sounds were the tires on the snow and his phone, which Zeke scowled at.

Every single song was reminding him of brown eyes and a dangerous smile.

_...She never gets out and she never gives in; she just changes her mind..._

He skipped the track.  

_Now I know the woman that you are; you're wonderful so far, and it's more than I hoped for…_

He skipped that one too.

_She's got a light around her and everywhere she goes a million dreams surround her..._

Skip.

He skipped Tell Her About It before Billy even started singing, then gave up and turned on the radio. Charlie Brown Christmas was there for him in all the platonic ways that Billy Joel was apparently not.

The snow was picking up.

Zeke chewed his bottom lip, looking out through the ice on his windshield. His wipers were starting to stick, and he cranked up the defroster under the windshield. It was only a mile or so further to his apartment complex, and he was grateful.

Through the storm, Zeke saw two blinking lights up ahead. The hazards on a Jeep, he saw as he got closer, a Jeep without snow tires, stalling at a stop sign.

“Who even drives a standard transmission anymore,” he muttered as he slowed to a stop behind it.

It wasn’t that he didn’t empathize—whoever was in the Jeep undoubtedly didn’t want to be stalling in the snow, and wanted to be home just as much as he did—but they were blocking the road. His apartment was literally just across the intersection, but there was a raised divider in the street and the roads were narrow to start with; he couldn’t go around. Again, not their fault. But still.

A good samaritan he was not, but sitting behind the Jeep and just brooding didn’t get either of them home faster.

Zeke shoved his hands into his pockets as he got out of the car, hunching forward as he walked through the snow up to the car in front of him. As he got closer, the driver tried again, and a stream of slush flew out from under the wheels, splattering Zeke.

“Hey,” he yelped as he jumped out of the way, and the driver turned quickly to look over her shoulder, dark ponytail flying and hitting the glass of her window.

No. Way.

Raven looked equally surprised to see him, her mouth parting in shock as she recognized the man trudging through the snow storm as her coworker.

“What are you doing?” she yelled through the glass.

“What are _you_ doing?” Zeke called back, hunching his shoulders at a particularly icy blast of wind.

Raven made an annoyed face—annoyed at the car, he hoped, not him—and rolled down her window.

“Hey, don’t do that,” he protested; her jacket was on the seat next to her.

Raven winced as snow blew into her car, but then she rolled her shoulders. “I turned the heat off when she stalled for the first time,” she said, her voice still raised to be heard over the storm, but quieter now that she didn’t have to yell through glass, “when I wanted to hear the engine.”

“I don’t think it’s your engine,” Zeke said, and as soon as he did, annoyance flashed across Raven’s face. It was definitely at him, this time.

“Yeah, no kidding,” she said, voice icy as the road keeping her stranded.

Zeke kicked himself inwardly; he hadn’t meant that to sound as mansplain-y as it probably had. Too late, he remembered a conversation from a month or so ago, when Raven had told him that she’d got her Jeep up and running. The Jeep, he remembered belatedly, that she’d built up from parts; of course she knew it was her tires and not the engine.

“Okay, I—” he began, not really sure how he was going to phrase that apology, but Raven turned from the window and cranked the engine again. Tires spun and slush flew, but no traction. She slumped back in the driver’s seat, an exasperated sigh coming out as a puff of warm air.

A car horn startled them both; Zeke turned and Raven craned her head out the window to see an Escalade behind Zeke’s car.

“I’d go if I could, buddy,” Raven muttered, and Zeke waved at the Escalade in a _yeah we know, we know_ gesture.

“Take this at face value, okay?” he said, turning back to the Jeep, hoping Raven’s raised eyebrow was a sign that she was listening. “That’s my apartment complex,” he continued, pointing, “if we stick this in neutral, and they decide to help instead of just honking at us, we can push it through the intersection into the lot.”

“If I can get her through the intersection, I can make it home,” Raven said determinedly.

“If you get this through the intersection,” Zeke said, knowing he was pushing it, but also wildly not okay with the thought of Raven continuing to drive home in this storm, “you’ll stall out again at the next patch of ice.”

Later, he told himself, he could examine why the thought of his not-crush stranded in the storm made him ridiculously overprotective.

He could see her mind working, as she considered her options. Namely, that she had none.

“Merry Christmas to all,” she muttered, running a hand through her hair.

Which Zeke took as acceptance, so he jogged back to the car behind his.

It was full of a couple of college kids, students at one of the business schools in the city, roadtripping out to one of their parents’ place in upstate. Raven made a face in the rearview mirror when five frat bro types piled out of the Escalade, but she stuck the car in neutral.

With the six of them pushing and Raven behind the wheel, it was actually pretty light.

They got it through the intersection, into the back of the parking lot, and Raven pulled a fifty out of her wallet to give to the kids, insisting they take it for gas money or something. Zeke left her rolling her window back up and ran back to his car; getting it across the intersection was quick work, and he reversed it beside Raven’s in the parking lot.

He was halfway across the lot when he realized she wasn’t following.

Admittedly, he hadn’t actually invited her up, and the plan had just been to get her car out of the road.

But she couldn’t seriously be planning on staying in her parked car in the cold.

Apparently she could, because when Zeke went back to the Jeep and tapped on the glass, she jumped, startled, looking up from her phone.

She cracked open the window.

“What’re you doing, Reyes?”

“Waiting for the snow to stop,” she said, like it was obvious.

“You can do that from inside.”

“I could,” she shrugged, “or I can wait for it out here.”

He wanted to say she wasn’t serious, but she clearly was; Zeke ran a hand over his face. “You’re shaking.”

“I am not,” she said, and she stilled her shoulders with effort, looking away.

Zeke waited.

After a moment, the shivers started again, and Raven glared at Zeke. Presumably, for having the audacity to care that she didn’t freeze to death.

“I don’t know what you’re waiting for—”

“This is not chivalry,” Zeke said sharply. “This is common sense. It’s literally freezing, and I’m not leaving you outside in this.”

“Well I’m not inviting myself over for Christmas Eve,” Raven shot back.

“I just invited you!” Zeke could hear the exasperation on his voice, but he was cold and she must be, and maybe that’s what was making her stubborn, but he really wasn’t about it.

Again, her calculated expression as she ran through her nonexistent options.

“I’ll wait in the lobby,” she conceded, and Zeke hid a smile.

“Thank you,” he said, and she frowned, leaning over her seat to grab her jacket. After a moment’s deliberation, she left her computer bag in the car, rolled up the window, and climbed out.

She was small, he realized, now that she wasn’t inside the cab of the vaulted car. As she shoved her hands into the arm of her jacket, Zeke had to clench his in his pockets to keep from reaching out to help her. Something told him it wouldn't be well-received. Not because it was him, but because this whole thing made it paramountly obvious that Raven Reyes didn’t like to be someone who needed help.

So he didn’t say anything, just walked towards the back door of the complex, relieved to hear Raven’s steps in the snow as she followed him. His key fob opened the door, and Raven muttered a 'thank you' as she ducked under his arm to get inside.

He almost ran into her when she stopped just inside.

“This is a stairwell,” she said quietly.

“Is that so?” Zeke said nonchalantly, walking around her and starting up the stairs.

“I said I wanted to wait in the lobby.”

“You did say that,” he called down, continuing up the stairs.

He reached the next level before he realized she hadn’t followed him. Suppressing a sigh, he leaned over the railing; sure enough, she hadn’t moved from the landing.

“Listen,” he said, not sure why he was pushing so hard but he needed this, “I know we haven’t like officially met or anything, so I’m sorry if this is weird, but I don’t let my friends just sit in the cold or in an empty lobby. The doorman would be annoyed and honestly it’d be freezing any time the door opened. I’m not coming onto you, okay, I just need you to be safe.”

A couple of different unreadable emotions passed over her face. Then she nodded, almost imperceptibly, and started up the stairs.

His apartment was on the fourth floor, and she stayed a full flight behind him the whole way. Something told him that was deliberate.

As Zeke opened the door, he hoped 7am Zeke had done him a solid and left the place clean.

It wasn’t sparkling, but it’d do.

He left the door ajar and shrugged out of his jacket before jogging through the living room, picking up a sweatshirt from the couch and flipping on the heater on his way to his room. The building had centralized heating, but he liked to leave a window cracked in the kitchen, just so it didn’t get stuffy. He tossed his sweatshirt into his laundry basket, then retrieved it a second later, once he realized his clothes were soaked from the storm. As he was pulling a sweatshirt over his head, he heard the door open slowly, and timid footsteps in his foyer. There was a shuffling as Raven kicked out of her shoes.

It wasn’t until that moment that he realized how awkward this was going to be.

“Uh,” he called, thinking that was probably the least intellectual thing he could vocalize. “Do you want coffee or something? Tea? Since it’s cold?”

“I’m good,” came the reply. “You went to Yale?”

Zeke winced, remembering the degree on the wall in the foyer. His mom had been so proud of it and insisted he hang it, so he’d compromised and put it behind the door, hoping no one would see it, since it always seemed like bragging.

“Yeah,” he called back. ”Go bulldogs.”

“Rah rah rah.”

Zeke dumped his wet clothes into the bin, then thought about it. Raven’s window had been down and she had walked through the snow too; her clothes were probably just as soaked.

“So,” he called, figuring it was better than ‘uh’, if only by a little, “do you want to get changed?”

There was a beat of silence, and Zeke was grateful for the walls between them. It was a platonic question, of course, and he really did just want her to feel comfortable, but he just really hoped she wasn’t reading anything into it.

After a moment, she cleared her throat. “Into what?”

He let out a sigh of relief. “I have a spare sweatshirt? Or pajamas. Or a flannel or like sweatpants or something; I don’t know but —”

“Will you stop rambling if I change?”

“Yes,” Zeke said immediately, and he might’ve heard a laugh.

“Then I’ll take a sweatshirt,” Raven called. “It’d better not say Yale.”

He looked through the top drawer of his dresser, finding one that Mel got him. “I have one from my sister’s alma mater?”

Raven’s head appeared in the doorway of his room. She looked around quickly, appraisingly, but stayed in the doorway, before looking back to him. “Is it to Yale?”

He unfolded the sweatshirt to demonstrate.

Raven whistled. “Your sister went to Harvard?”

“Against my better judgement.”

She smiled, holding out her hand for the sweatshirt. “I bet Thanksgivings are fun.”

Zeke smiled back—what else was he supposed to do?—and grabbed a pair of flannel pajama pants before crossing over to Raven, and presenting the stack of folded clothes. She accepted them with ceremony, and followed his pointed hand for the bathroom.

When she shut the door, Zeke spun in a circle. He didn’t know what, but he had to do _something_ , something other than freaking out that Raven Reyes was in his apartment.

Dinner, right? She had to eat?

Of course she eats, everyone eats, but what would Raven eat?

He started boiling water for pasta, because it required exactly 2 braincells to do so, and he was pretty sure he couldn’t mess that up. He didn’t hear the door open, but he didn’t hear any other calamitous noises either, so he assumed Raven was okay and just chilling in the other room. He read the instructions on the mac and cheese to himself, just double checking that there wasn’t anything different from the ninety thousand times he’d made mac and cheese for himself.

Nope, just add milk and the packet and butter, if he wanted, same as always. But would Raven want butter?

“Sure.”

Zeke nearly jumped out of his skin; Raven was perched on the counter behind him, her legs swinging a bit, and an amused expression on her face.

Over the blood rushing to his ears and the ridiculous jolt in his pulse, Zeke’s heart wobbled a bit. Because she looked really comfortable in his house, and that was just a really nice thought.

He shook the pasta box at her. “You’re lucky I didn’t drop this.”

Raven shrugged. “Something tells me you’ve got another dozen boxes in the cabinet.”

“Only eleven,” he snarked back, even though the number was actually more like two. “Is mac and cheese okay?”

“Mac and cheese is okay.”

And with that, there wasn’t anything else to say. In fact, there wasn’t anything much to _do_ , and Zeke washed dishes he normally would’ve chucked in the dishwasher, just so his hands could stay busy. By the time he was done with that, the water was boiling, and he dumped the shells into it.

He should say something, he knew that much, but not what.

Wait, it was Christmas Eve.

He frowned, looking up at her while he stirred. “Do you need to like, call someone? Let your family know you’re okay?”

Raven didn’t shutter, didn’t look hurt or offended, but an expression like she was tired passed over her face. “Nope,” she said simply, and then she met his eyes.

And it wasn’t like he saw pools of emotions in them, or like she was barely staying afloat in the middle of this, it was just that she meant it, and it really was as simple as that.

Zeke nodded, looking back at the pasta.

“On that note, though,” Raven said after a moment, “thank you. For helping.”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Her hands were clenched in her lap and her jaw was set, and it was like the words tasted like saline in her mouth.

“No worries,” he said quickly, as casually as he could. The last thing he wanted was to make her feel like he was inconvenienced. As if finding out his crush was an actual human, and a beautiful human, and then having her stranded in his apartment wasn’t the actual definition of a Christmas miracle.

Raven’s mouth opened, then she snapped it shut, and nodded to herself, like that was that.

“So...now what?” she asked hesitantly.

“Now mac and cheese,” Zeke said helpfully, before he checked the clock. “Well, in like 6 minutes.”

Raven rolled her eyes. “Okay, then what.”

Zeke had been wondering that too. “I think Home Alone is on Netflix?”

“Which one?”

Zeke scoffed. “If I’d meant any of them other than the first aka the only legitimate one aka the best one, I think I would’ve said it.”

Raven’s mouth quirked into a smile. “Pardon my lack of expertise in the Home Alone universe,” she said dryly.

“Pardoned.”

And though Raven’s smile deepened at his response, it pretty much ended that line of conversation. Other than telling Raven where the bowls and spoons were when she asked, Zeke hadn’t anything to say. When their Pasta a la Kraft was finished and in bowls, she followed him into the living room like it was the easiest thing to do.

He didn’t think she’d sit like right next to him on the couch, but he’d also kind of hoped that she wouldn’t sit as far away as humanly possible, which was exactly what she did.

Well, at the start.

After Zeke pressed play, Raven’s posture and demeanor relaxed by the minute. By the time Catherine O’Hara was sprinting through the airport with her menagerie of a family, Raven had settled back from the edge of the couch to actually resting her back on the cushions. When Kevin screamed because of aftershave, Raven snorted, and Zeke looked over to see her legs were curled up under her. When Harry and Marv began their first break in attempt, Raven leaned over and grabbed a blanket off the ottoman, shaking it out and then covering herself up to her chin with it.

“Are you cold?” Zeke asked, and Raven looked over, surprised to see him watching her.

“Hmm? Oh, no,” she looked down at the blanket, understanding. “It’s just the right way to watch Christmas movies.”

He had no idea what that meant, but it was right, of course it was, because she’d said it like it was. Zeke couldn’t imagine thinking anything she’d said was wrong.

He realized he was staring when she raised an eyebrow, and looked quickly back to the movie.

He didn’t watch any of the rest of it, though, just kept sneaking glances at Raven out of the corner of his eyes.

Her hair was down.

At work, and in the car, she’d had it in a pony tail, and it had suited her. She didn’t have time for anything in her way; she was that good. But with her hair down, that suited her too. She seemed comfortable, and Zeke thought about the gifts wrapped in garish red and green paper in his room, that his mom and sister had sent, and how those presents would be special and sweet, but that he wouldn’t get a greater gift than knowing that Raven felt comfortable around him.

Her eyes widened at the bandits’ antics, and a smug sort of approval settled over her face each time Kevin countered them. Zeke hadn’t gotten the impression that she was a guarded person, but there was something so guileless in how she was enjoying the movie. It was a complete lack of pretense, which was something he didn’t often see in people.

Plus she just looked adorable in the sweatshirt and flannel pants. _His_ sweatshirt and flannel pants.

The movie ended, as movies are want to do.

Zeke hopped up to bring their dishes into the kitchen, telling himself to get a grip. She was tired, it was Christmas Eve, it’d been a long day...there were a lot of explanations for why Raven looked like she didn’t want to get up off the couch. But there was something like blind hope, deep in his chest, that wondered if maybe she was wishing the evening would drag on just as much as he was.

He set the dishes in the sink, wondering what the next step was. Before he could figure it out, there was a padded step from the living room, and then Raven was next to him at the sink, pulling a dish towel off the towel rack. She looked up at him expectantly, like this was normal, natural, and Zeke made himself look away, because she was his coworker, and if he was lucky, his friend, and he really had to pull himself together before this crush thing got way out of hand.

“Or,” Raven said, something like uncertainty on her voice, “if you wanted to dry, I can wash the dishes?”

And he looked back at her, at the slight crease in her forehead, telling him that she’d misread his silence, and Zeke knew it was too late, he was too late, that he couldn’t catch himself now. He couldn’t imagine what was written on his face, but Raven’s frown deepened, and her mouth parted slightly, like she understood.

“Sorry, no,” he said abruptly, ripping his eyes from her, not wanting to see her face when she realized that yep, he had an embarrassingly strong crush on someone who he’d just officially met today. “I can wash; that’s fine.”

“Oh.”

She said it so quietly that he almost looked back at her, almost checked that he hadn’t misread anything, that maybe the blind hope wasn’t blind after all. But then in his peripherals, he saw her shake her shoulders and step closer to the sink. She smiled brightly, forehead crease gone, waiting for the dishes.

There weren’t many.

Just the two bowls, two spoons, wooden spoon from stirring the pasta, the bowl he’d mixed it in, and the pot. Took all of five minutes to wash.

Five minutes that passed agonizingly slow, because they didn’t way a word. In the reflection on the window above the sink, Zeke could watch the top of Raven’s head. The steadiness with which she moved, the deliberation of it, like every movement was intentional. And he knew, with a sinking feeling, that whatever illusion of comfort has been in place during the movie, was now completely gone.

He handed her the last bowl, and she took it, carefully, still not looking at him. He wiped his hands on his jeans as she finished drying it, turning his back to the sink and leaning against it. Raven was paying very close attention to it, eyes and hands busy. She put the bowl down on the counter, folded the towel, deliberately, placed it next to the dry dishes.

And then she looked up at him, and he felt it all the way through him.

She tilted her head, stepped around his feet, just in front of him. Her eyes trailed up from their level, over his sweatshirt, past his collar, his throat, his jaw, his mouth, his nose, his eyes. He felt her fingers tightening on his sweatshirt, a gentle pressure, and she pulled him down, lowering his head. As he bent, Raven’s gaze dropped to his mouth, and her breath caught before her eyes flitted back up to his. And he was so close, just a breath away and neither of them were breathing. Her eyes darted between his and Raven licked her lips quickly.

“Day after tomorrow,” she said, her voice, low, soft, just above a whisper, “I go back to the IT department; you go back to sales. Nothing happened tonight; everything is exactly as it was.”

Her fingers tightened on his shirt, and then he felt her other hand coming up to his face. Zeke's eyes fluttered as her fingers settled on his jawline, tracing, curious. Light, gentle, uncertain.

“Tell me that’s not what you want,” she whispered and of course, of course that wasn’t what he wanted; nothing could be farther from what he wanted. And Raven searched his eyes, moving impossibly closer, and her hand slipped into his hair.

“Or,” she said, her head tilting again, this time away from him, asking, waiting, “Show me.”

Zeke moved, he couldn’t not, catching her sigh of relief with his mouth. She let go of his shirt, leaned into him, and he was wrong, everything was wrong, because Raven on his couch, in his kitchen, under a blanket, wasn’t right; in his arms was right. Her lips under his, her soft sigh into his mouth, her hands running up his arms, that was right. Everything was right.

She pulled back first, and Zeke wanted to chase after her, but settled for lacing his fingers together in the small of her back.

Raven’s eyes were closed and she was breathing slowly carefully, like she was just waking up. Her lashes fluttered and when she opened her eyes, Zeke finally understood what the word breathtaking meant, because why would he need air when Raven was looking at him like that.

And then she smiled.


End file.
